The guitar hung in the pawnshop window like some beautiful bird that had been taxidermized and strung up for display. It struck Oliver with a hard jolt of desire, and he stood there on the sidewalk, transfixed. He took in the sunburst design on the pleasantly rotund body: dark at the edges, giving way to warm, muted golds and scarlets that reminded him of some postcard-worthy Hawaiian sunset. The fretboard was a burnished, sleek mahogany. The tuning pegs glistened chrome, contrasting with the dark, slightly asymmetrical wooden head. He gazed at the pearlescent inlay dotting the fretboard and outlining the sound hole, which looked like a welcoming mouth.
He was in an unfamiliar neighborhood, walking back to the El after a doctor’s appointment. He had always loved music, but for reasons unclear to him had never tried to learn an instrument. Now he was in his fortieth year, his midsection thickening and his hair thinning. He remembered his father’s passing the previous year; hale and healthy one day, gone from a massive stroke the next. The BMI, blood pressure, and cholesterol numbers his doctor had just pronounced filled him with a sense of impending mortality, a physical presence in his chest that made his beating heart feel like something frail and transient.
As he stared at the guitar, he swore he could the music he’d so loved as a youth: poor, doomed Kurt Cobain’s haunting riffs on “All Apologies;” the otherworldly strumming of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity;” the poignant fingerpicking of Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind.” He saw that the tag on the guitar read $200. Oliver decided he had to have it. So he went down the street until he found the closest ATM, then returned to the pawnshop where the colorless clerk, whose silver hair and steel rimmed glasses stood as a counterpoint to the caramelly warmth of the guitar, took the instrument out of the window and handed it to him.
Oliver ran his hands over the smooth lacquer of the body, stroking the narrowed waist of the guitar as if he were caressing a lover’s warm and giving hip. He felt somehow aroused and almost forgot where he was until he was interrupted by the clerk clearing his throat. Oliver looked up with a start, then back down at the guitar in his hands. In a dry and cracked voice, he said, “I’ll take it.”
The clerk gave him an ironic smirk. “You don’t want to play it a little, test it out?”
“I don’t play,” Oliver replied. The clerk’s smirk twisted a few degrees until it became mocking. Oliver’s eyes drifted back to the beautiful guitar he held in his arms, then he finally managed to stammer, “I’m going to learn.”
As the clerk rung him up, he looked down at the glass case that served as the counter and saw an electronic tuner and a box of plastic picks. He bought those as well.
He left the pawn shop with the guitar in the battered, figure-eight shaped black case that came with it. He got on the El and propped the guitar awkwardly between his knees as he headed back to his apartment. As he rode home, he held the head of the case in his arms, feeling the warm glow of new possibility.
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